Bronwen Robbins is an award winning costume designer located in Fredericton New Brunswick Canada. She specializes in recreating costumes from cartoons, movies, books and television.

Wednesday, 5 March 2014

And the Helmet begins!

If anything has been keeping me awake at night over this costume, it's Kain's helmet. I mean have you seen this thing?

It's a dragon head on top of my head! I've seen it done, and it almost always looks too big and/or goofy. So, it really put the "oh God, how do I do this thing right?" fear into me. It is probably one of the most iconic things about Kain Highwind, and while the rest of my armor could be awesome, if that helmet looked dumb, my costume would be ruined.

I'd just think about it and I'm pretty sure this would be my face:

HOWEVER

I happen to have 2 friends who are amazing at Cosplay. I am speaking of course about Ana and her fella Bryan. They made some spectacular Dragon Age costumes for Animarime and Halcon last year, and Ana makes Ball Jointed dolls, so if anyone could help me with the 3d monster that is Kain's helmet, I knew they could.

And they are awesome, so they agreed!

First off was wrapping my head in saran wrap and the covering it in duct tape while I had my wig on. Why was I wearing the wig? Well it will add extra volume to my head and if I hadn't warn it and just gone with my regular head with no wig, the helmet might not fit over the wig in the end, and then I would be screwed.

Once my head was wrapped and some jokes were made about how I now looked like Angewomon from Digimon, Ana took measurements of my head and blew up the image of Kains helmet on her computer to scale with it and printed it off. Then Bryan and I got to go all arts and crafty and cut it out/taped it together. The end result was Kain's helmet to scale with my head.

Since the image was blown up, it was a tad fuzzy, but Ana is a queen with sharpies and drew over the lines to bring out the different shapes that we would need to cut out. The helmet is probably going to be in 2 parts that lock together with magnets or something so I can fit it in my carry on or suit case (since it has to fly to Toronto with me).

Checking the Dragon head for the angle that will be needed to get my silhouette to match Kain's

Once that was done, it was time to break out some old cereal boxes to make patterns for the lower part of the mask, map it out on my face and see what if any adjustments would be needed.

This is as far as we got that night, my homework was to make the under helmet (seen in the duct tape) in craft foam, make sure it fit aright and then to cast it in Worbla. Unfortunately, I got horribly sick for a week, and haven't done that yet, but that is part of my plan for today along with doing some detail work on my chest, thigh and shin armor I molded earlier this week once I was feeling better.

I take no credit for anything here, all I did was sit there, watch Pacific Rim and try not to sneeze (I was already sick at this point) this is all the brilliant work of Ana and Bryan.. You should check out her blog and see the amazing dolls, doll clothes and doll sized sets she makes! It is in french but can be translated to English with google quite easily!

About Me

I am a award winning costume designer located in scenic New Brunswick Canada.
I started this blog to show the amount of work that goes into making clothes and for sharing ideas with people who may be stuck on how to make something.